Upstairs, right outside my toddler’s room, hangs this striking, blue-blue print of an Icelandic glacier ice cave: the Crystal Ice Cave, circa 2015, long since vanished. My friend Þorri took the image and gifted it to me during one of my many stays over the last 20 years. My son visits the print often. When he was about a year-and-a-half, he pointed to it and confirmed, “blue.” Add two more years and the name of the glacier, “Breiðamerkurjökull,” rolls off his tongue. Lately, just like he asks about my husband and me and our cats and the mailbox and the couch, he asks about the glacier in the picture. How is Breiðamerkurjökull feeling today? Sad? Hungry? Happy? OK? This gets fraught quickly. I’m a writer and a glacier scientist — I’ve spent the bulk of my career working on, in, and around this particular glacier system, trying to understand what is happening to it, how people and communities respond to its changes, and how the future of this glacier impacts humanity worldwide. And Breiðamerkurjökull — this huge sweep of snow and ice some 8.5 miles wide and 28 miles long, Iceland’s third-largest glacier — is decidedly not OK. Between 1982 and 2020, nearly 3 miles of this glacier’s physical body dissolved away into the sea. This current rate of melt is rapid and unnatural, and as it accelerates, more tubes and tunnels form within the glacier body, what we call moulins in glaciology but everyone else calls “ice caves.” So…
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